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Why It’s OK to Hoard Old E-mail Messages

By Farhad Manjoo March 20, 2009 2:53 pmMarch 20, 2009 2:53 pm

In a column two weeks ago, I sketched out an easy way to manage an overflowing e-mail inbox. The topic sparked wide discussion online, including one question about a key part of my system: “Why don’t you simply delete your old mail?” several readers wanted to know.

To recap, my system goes like this: First, create an e-mail folder called Archive (if you use Google’s Gmail, this is built in), and shove most of your old mail into that folder. From now on, whenever you’re finished with an e-mail message in your inbox, put it into your archive folder. This will result in a clear inbox and a clear mind.

But you’ll have an even clearer mind, some insisted, if you completely rid yourself of old mail. As one reader wrote,

“The problem is similar to other nonelectronic hoarding. My mother used to keep every single bill, every single piece of junk mail, every expired coupon, all carefully archived (back then we called it “stuck somewhere in the filing cabinet.”) The problem, of course, is that email makes us feel overly important and we fear that somehow we are going to need some piece of information in the future, no matter how useless that information might be.”

I understand the impulse to delete; it’s the same nagging impulse that prompts you to clean your garage or basement every year. Why clutter up your space with so much useless junk? If you get rid of it completely, you’ll be truly liberated!

When it comes to e-mail, though, this impulse is a bit misguided. For one thing, old e-mail is often useful, and it’s difficult to predict which messages will be helpful months or years from now. Even messages from Facebook telling you that a friend has written something on your “wall” might be handy to keep; Facebook offers no way to search through your “wall” postings, so if you want to look for a specific missive from your friend last year, you’ll have an easier time looking for that message in your e-mail than on Facebook. And of course, there are lots of other more important messages — receipts, notes from your boss, letters from your mortgage agent, etc. — that you’ll surely have occasion to look up in a few months’ time.

But there’s a more fundamental reason why hoarding e-mail is OK: Your computer, unlike your garage, keeps growing. Today’s machines give you hundreds of gigabytes of room to store all your mail, and you can be assured that before you get anywhere near using up all that space, you’ll be ready to move your mail to a new computer that will have even more room. It’s even easier if you store all your mail online — services like Gmail offer tons of space, and they keep growing.

Moreover, there’s no digital equivalent to the “clutter” of a messy house. When your apartment gets overrun with junk, it becomes difficult to find things — your keys, your cat, your kids. But today’s e-mail systems offer amazing search features, so pulling up something important is simply a matter of punching in the right keywords, regardless of how much “junk” you’ve got in your archive.

Indeed, it’s far simpler to archive everything than to decide, on a case-by-case basis, which messages deserve should be saved and which should be deleted. Some e-mail clients even let you automatically archive all messages past a certain date (see this link for instructions on how to set this up in Microsoft Outlook.)

So don’t worry — let old mail pile up in your archive, and spend your free time cleaning up your garage.

It’s OK to hoard old email messages – until you get sued or otherwise have to produce them to a third party. At that point you’ll *really* wish you hadn’t saved everything – because if you have it, and it’s relevant, you’ll have to produce it.

And if you have, say, 25,000 emails, you’ll have a choice: give them everything, and hope you recall and can explain the context of every hasty email, every tired and angry email, and every sensitive or personal email; or sort through the pile trying to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I hope that everyone in your organization isn’t following your lead – as that becomes a *massive* pile to sift through.

Various litigation support firms have cited costs of $2 per message or anywhere from $1000 – $3,500 per GB to review and produce email. So that 1TB drive, that you bought for $99 this weekend? The cost to review that TB worth of email starts at a cool $1million and goes up from there.

Finally, as to the “amazing search capabilities” email offers – the biggest trend in e-discovery today is litigants who conduct those amazing searches but don’t use good enough search terms – and who are being sanctioned to the tune of millions of dollars in hard costs and in being forced to do the searches over and over again with more terms.

So I understand your premise but I don’t think you’ve really thought through the ramifications of it – and I certainly hope that the New York Times legal and records management departments don’t follow your advice!

I find the best way to keep my In-Box tidy is to set up sub folders under “Read Mail” and “Sent Mail” and file the e-mails away when you are done with them or after you’ve sent them. Leave to “To Do” and reminder e-mails in the in box and file them as they get resolved. This way there is a filed record of e-mails received and sent for each category and a list of things to do only remaining in the “In-Box”. Maybe that’s just stating the obvious but it really helps keep me organized and reminds me of things I need to get to. Sometimes it is 1-2 e-mails in the “In-Box” and other times it may be 10 but it never gets out of hand this way. If I don’t get to them after a month, they probably weren’t that important and they get filed away. With enough sub-folders, it makes it easy to back and find information when you need it. It’s good to have that electronic paper trail when you need it.

It’s my understanding that emails that have been deleted can cause significant legal issues if and when one is sued. Most legal departments will advise their people to NOT put things in emails, and to NOT delete emails because of the legal ramifications. So I would actually be surprised if the NYT legal department hasn’t issued an email policy that forbids deleting emails.

Having said that, I almost never delete emails, even personal emails on my personal accounts, unless I am 100% sure they are fluff. And I almost always insist on communicating via email, especially when I am concerned that I need to cover my behind. I take great pains to make sure that I am very careful what I say in an email, as I am fully aware that it could come back to haunt me. On the other hand, there is nothing like being able to pull up an email to show someone that they really did say that.

Email is one of the greatest tools for not only making sure that what you heard is actually what they said, but for making sure that what they hear is what you said. As I said, I only delete true fluff, and then only after pondering its “fluff-ness” carefully.

On the topic of being able to search email: I was searching for a book I couldn’t anywhere. My books are semi-sorted but even that is unreliable. I kept having this feeling in my fingers as I looked.

I realized it was a desire to be able to enter the name of the book in a search engine. My fingers were typing, or trying to.

I do keep emails. I’ve been sorting them into folders but really, with search engines there is no need to do that. And I can often not remember which folder I put the message into anyway. Your column gives me support for not even sorting that way — except for a To Do folder for info that needs entered somewhere else.

For Haven, in Mac Mail you can set up various mailboxes, then under Preferences, if you go to rules you can set up rules to send your email to specific mailboxes based on who sent it, who it was sent to, text in the subject line, etc.

I archive all real mail and delete the rest. By real mail, I mean an email containing useful material, say like in the facebook example above, real mail would actually contain the ‘wall posting’, not merely a notification that a friend wrote on the wall.

Also I delete all the newsletters unless I they do point to something more interesting. In case I need something, I can always go to the website and search for it.

Filter everything into folders. I’ve used Eudora since around 1993 and have every email I’ve received and sent since then in the folder under the person who sent it. No need to search, it’s always obvious where it is. OK why keep it? Well, why not? Sometimes it’s useful. Sometimes you simply want to look back, randomly.

Can’t see the reason why newer systems don’t have proper filtering systems. Gmail just seems like managed chaos. Why have chaos when you can have order?

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